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Who’s the boss?

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

12/8/10, 9:06 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 9:06 PM CET

Interviews for EEAS managing directors are still going on.

If the European Parliament and the member states can agree on a 2011 budget, then the EU’s new diplomatic service will begin work in earnest on 3 January. That is when the bulk of its personnel will be transferred en bloc from the European Commission and the secretariat of the Council of Ministers.

But many of the newcomers might yet find themselves starting without a boss. While the top management of the European External Action Service (EEAS) has been in place since 1 December, interviews for the second tier, the managing directors who are to supervise the service’s six departments, are still going on, at least according to staff close to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who is supposed to be in charge of it all. Names of the likely appointees have been circulating for months, but Ashton’s taste for dragging things out is so great that her plans may yet unravel.

Christian Leffler was helping Ashton on constructing the EEAS in addition to his day job as the Commission’s deputy director-general for development. He is pencilled in to run the Middle East and North Africa department, but there have been some grumbling from member states (particularly the new ones) that Swedes will have too many good jobs because, on 16 November, Olof Skoog – a Swedish diplomat – was named as chairman of the Political and Security Committee, a powerful body of member states’ ambassadors that manages the EU’s common foreign and security policy. Ashton’s candidates are being hung out to dry for no discernible reason.